In all of my posts on testing services I always held the notion that there were two primary roles, the coder and the tester. There is a different model that I believe can work. That is the role of the dedicated coder-tester. This person is more coder than tester (rather than a tester-coder, which is like so totally different) and belongs to the coding team. Their responsibility is to write some of the unit tests for other coders in their team.
This is not an opportunity for coder to palm of shoddy code to the new guy. The code written by the coder-tester would exercise the services primarily from a black-box perspective and ideally, would be deployable into the non-functional environments for analysis.
Trying to sell this position may be difficult as the concept of a “permanent unit tester” is not the sexiest position in the company and the person involved needs to be a skilled coder as well as understanding how to effectively test an application. Such people are usually placed on more “cost effective” tasks like coding the more complicated systems.
Note: A tester-coder belongs to the test team, can code and usually serves the following roles; create testing tools; technical integration testing and telling coders their doing it wrong while not actually doing anything themselves.
2nd Note: I consider automation-testers separate from tester-coders because in more cases than not automation-testers are script-kiddies that take every opportunity to ignore good software development practices because they have this perception are not working on production code.
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Ryan Boucher is a Software Inquisitor and is passionate about it. You can find a whole raft of articles and anecdotes about software testing and other topics he gets excited about. |
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